Smartphone cameras have improved a great deal since the birth of the smartphone, but photos captured in certain settings are still pretty mediocre.

Nokia, the Finnish handset maker, who in recent years has struggled to compete in the smartphone market, wants to change that.

The Nokia Lumia 1020 brings a large sensor camera with an extremely high megapixel resolution to digital smartphone photography. With stellar imaging capabilities on board, Nokia had made a huge investment in Microsoft’s Windows Phone 8 platform.

Some of the technology in the Lumia 1020 is actually borrowed from an earlier smartphone, the Nokia PureView 808.

The Nokia Lumia 1020, a 41-megapixel camera with a large sensor, Xenon flash, Zeiss optics, and lossless digital zooming technology coupled with optical image stabilization on Microsoft’s Windows Phone 8 platform, the camera performs admirably well under most conditions, including outdoors, under low light with and without the flash, and even indoors with many types of indoor lighting.

Under stressful lighting conditions of the red carpet, the Lumia 1020 didn’t perform too well. The Lumia 1020 comes with a 4.5-inch display, a dual-core 1.5GHz Snapdragon processor, 2GB of RAM, and 32GB of storage.

Nokia Lumia 1020 took center stage in China on Thursday morning at a launch event launch event held by Nokia China’s general manager, Erik Bertman and several partners. The Lumia will be priced unlocked for 5,999 yuan or $973.

The Lumia 1020 will initially be sold by China Unicom. To help budget-conscious consumers, the carrier will offer the phone at 999 yuan ($163) and then 386 yuan ($63) over a period of three years.